Top 10 DJs Worldwide: Trance Holds the Crown as Armin van Buuren Edges David Guetta by 10 Points

The headline number is 938. That is Armin van Buuren's credit score, and it is enough to put the Dutch trance mainstay at the top of the worldwide ranking — ten points clear of David Guetta's 928. Guetta actually drew slightly more votes, 11,970 to Armin's 11,940, but on score the gap holds, and it hands trance the crown over commercial dance at the very top of the table.

What makes this edition striking is how little separates everyone else. From Skrillex at 923 down to Martin Garrix at 909, eight DJs sit within 14 points of each other. There are two outright ties: Paul van Dyk and John Summit share 913 at fifth and sixth, while Boris Brejcha and Martin Garrix both close the list at 909. When margins are this thin, ranking order becomes a photo finish rather than a verdict.

Trance is the quiet story here. Three of the top five — Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, and Paul van Dyk — carry the trance flag, and two of them are Dutch. Add Martin Garrix at ten and the Netherlands lands three artists in the top ten, more than any other country. Van Dyk's entry is worth pausing on: at 913, the German veteran sits ahead of names with far larger streaming footprints, and his 252 logged festival appearances point to a career still built on the road as much as on platforms.

Scale and score are not the same thing. Guetta's streaming reach is enormous — 87,684,123 Spotify monthly listeners and 28,205,283 Spotify followers, the largest figures on this list — yet the credit score still favors Armin. Skrillex, third at 923, brings a different kind of weight: 6,675,563 SoundCloud followers, the biggest SoundCloud audience in the top ten, a reminder of where bass music culture actually lives. Meanwhile Carl Cox, seventh at 912, posts 1,118,000 Spotify monthly listeners — a fraction of the pop-adjacent names above him — but leads everyone on Mixcloud with 259,283 followers, the platform where the DJ mix, not the single, is the currency. Techno's figurehead is ranked on techno's terms.

The newer wave is closing fast. John Summit, tied at 913, is the melodic house and techno standard-bearer with 12,753,197 Spotify monthly listeners — remarkable proximity to the legacy names for an American act in that lane. James Hype at 910 tells a similar story from the tech house side: 12,320,890 monthly listeners on Spotify and 1,700,000 on TikTok, an audience skewing toward the short-form era. Boris Brejcha rounds out the melodic contingent at 909, with a notably loyal base — his 1,690,041 Spotify followers sit almost level with his 1,757,643 monthly listeners, a ratio that suggests people who find him, stay.

Martin Garrix closing the list at 909 says more about the field than about him. With 24,718,671 Spotify monthly listeners and 15,202,056 Instagram followers, the big room star has one of the largest audiences here — and still lands tenth on score. Voter turnout was heavy across the board, every entry drawing over 11,000 votes, with Guetta (11,970), Armin (11,940), and Garrix (11,910) leading participation.

The takeaway: this is a ranking where credibility, not raw reach, sets the order. Trance's old guard holds the summit, techno and melodic house crowd the middle, and the score compression from third place down promises that next edition, very small swings could reshuffle almost everything below the top two.